Catherine Hardwicke on Twilight

Catherine Hardwicke knew she had to get Twilight right. Most people wouldn't know if she screwed up Lords of Dogtown or Thirteen, but there were a lot of obsessed vampire fans to answer to here. Hardwicke worked her actors through early rehearsals to make sure they got their characters down.

Hardwicke Casts Twilight

"In this case, we had about three weeks, tried to have three weeks," Hardwicke said. "I think it turned out to be like two and a half or two, where as many of the actors as we could get came up to Portland. And then we were all in the same hotel so we would have rooms in the hotels. Usually, my other movies, it's at my house because it's a little funkier atmosphere, so we would just go through the scenes in the film and we would try to do physical activities together. In this case we did baseball."

Baseball provides a pivotal scene for the Cullen vampire clan, and it also bonded the crew. "We all had to learn how to play baseball and those would be like bonding moments: going out to the location, freezing in the rain, learning how to hit a ball. We did go through each scene."

Then there was time alone with Bella and Edward, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. "Usually the scenes that are Rob and Kristen, it would be just the three of us and we would really hash it out, like is this working? Do I feel it? Can I say that line? A lot of times for them, this has been written before, they didn't feel good about a line and they really had to make it their own or they wouldn't say the lines. So we had to find something that worked for everybody."

Stewart was Hardwicke's first choice ever since she saw her in Into the Wild. "I thought she was sensational. I could not believe what expression and how palpable I felt her yearning and her desire sitting in that trailer, that mobile home and how much she wanted Emile. I just thought that's awesome that anyone could convey that."

Pattinson had to earn it. "We finally got it down to like our top five and I talked to Rob on the phone in London and was still kind of sketchy. Finally his agent said, 'Okay, he's going to fly over here on his own dime and sleep on my couch. Then he's going to come audition.'"

Once cast, Pattison was a team player all the way. When good weather threatened their overcast shoot, he played along. "Actually that was really a bad day because the sun came out almost all day. If you look on the website on our weather blogs, you see that we had got the whole crew trying to pull clouds out of the sky and doing cloud dances and all the extras spelled out CLOUD because we couldn't shoot at all. Finally, when we got some clouds, and he had been wearing sunglasses in the day because it was so sunny and you can't have sun because he's a vampire. So finally when it came out, I was just like what the heck? Put those sunglasses on. Let's do it. We were crazed by that point."